Decorating With Flowers

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Tip for building a medium-sized arrangement (like this one):Start with a focal flower (here, it’s the two-toned dahlia) and build your arrangement around that. Add some greenery for filler and contrast, as well as some secondary flowers of a different color.

Flora and FaunaYou can do more with flowers than just plunk them in a vase

By Janet Reynolds/518Life

While having flowers in your home is an option all year, summer is when adding fresh flowers to your home décor can be as easy as walking into your backyard or taking a short trip to your favorite farmers market.

This is, of course, assuming you know what to do with the flowers once you’ve got them. Sure, you can plunk them into a vase and hope for the best. But with just a bit more thinking — and following some of the very helpful tips from Decorate with Flowers — you can create an arrangement that moves up to the wow level.

Not all flowers have to be in a vase.Try creating a wall arrangement using colored tape and a variety of flowers. The next day, Becker and Shewring suggest, clip the flower heads and float them in a bowl to enjoy them longer.

Decorate with Flowers is by wildly successful Decor8 blogger Holly Becker and photographer Leslie Shewring, who has worked with Becker on the blog and her successful Blogging Your Way e-courses for a few years. While they are both wildly creative and talented — just flip through any of Becker’s previous books or stop by either of their blogs for a nano-second for proof — they are also not professionally trained flower designers. The point is that you, too, can do this.

The book offers information about basic tools you’ll need to make your job easier, suggests strategies for picking the right containers, and offers clear pointers on how to create a variety of arrangements. (Hint: Not every arrangement needs to be in just one vase or even in a vase at all.) The authors also show readers how to pick the right flowers so that they work best in specific color palettes and home design styles. What will work in a beach-themed home, for instance, will not in a modern, contemporary home.